The Mother

“the mother” is a deeply introspective poem driven by the speaker’s internal reckoning. The shape of the poem follows the stream of consciousness of a would-be mother attempting to make sense of the emotional fallout of several abortions. The paradox of having and not-having these children is introduced in the second line: “You remember the children you got that you did not get” (Line 2). The use of the second-person pronoun “you” throughout the first stanza creates an imagined dialogue between the speaker and herself. This address creates distance between the speaker and herself at the beginning of the poem, allowing her a somewhat more objective way into the difficult topic at hand. She states the truth of her situation simply, as if she were an observer. The simple fact is that these children would never work, never be married, never laugh or cry or suck their thumbs. Still, this objectivity only lasts for so long. By the last couplet, the speaker’s descriptions betray a consuming love for the children with her use of food-adjacent language: “luscious sigh…a snack of them…gobbling mother-eye” (Lines 9-10).

The speaker closes the distance between herself and her actions by assuming first-person pronouns in the second stanza. The “dim killed children” (Line 11) are faint, and yet they’re forcefully present, a move accentuated by the poet breaking from the rhyme scheme in this line. The speaker addresses these children directly with more indulgent language, calling them “Sweets” (Line 14) because they are so dear to her, and also because they were never given proper names. She cannot state definitively if she “poisoned the beginnings of [their] breaths” (Line 20). The use of conditional tense demonstrates uncertainty on the part of the speaker, as well as unease about the consequences of her actions. However, if she did sin, seize, and steal, she urges the children to believe her when she says it was never her intention to cause such harm, even if her actions were deliberate.

The doublethink here is as complicated as her feelings on the matter. She is fully conscious of the rippling effects of abortion, the potential futures cut short, and yet the very nature of her choice precludes her from ever fully understanding what exactly it is that was lost. The lives of these imaginary children are characterized by absence and the unknowable. This is a merciful and brutal realization, and the speaker hovers between plausible deniability and harsh accusation: perhaps she “sinned,” “stole,” “seized” life away (Lines 14, 17), or perhaps she shielded them from abuse and suffering. Whether the mother would have neglected or beaten or comforted them, she can’t know for sure; all she can know is that she prevented all of the above. The speaker upholds a nuanced view of life as a mixture of joy and suffering, and as a result, she must acknowledge that in having an abortion, she both protected her children from hardships and prevented them from experiencing the pleasures of existence.

Regardless, the speaker says as she criticizes herself for indulging her woes, the outcome is the same: the children no longer exist. The plain, coarse tone makes a return as the speaker chides herself for indulging her own feelings when it is the children with whom she should be concerned. Again, she struggles to articulate the precise nature of their existence:

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? (Lines 23-28)

The speaker eventually settles on these three truths: the children existed physically; they were born, in a way; and they ceased living, although whether what they experienced could be called a life is still up for debate. By the last stanza the speaker has broken from rhyme entirely. Instead, she employs an assertive voice and repetition to entreat her children to rest easy in the fact that she loved them. Here the pleading, vulnerable tone returns in her repeated pleas for the children to believe her. The raw insistence of these lines betrays a fear that the addressees, despite her insistences, might not believe her and might deny her love for them. The ambiguous “you” continues to directly address the children of the previous stanza, and it also gestures back to the speaker’s self-address in the first stanza of the poem. This love is directed at the children of course, but also at the speaker herself. She knows her doubtful, skeptical self well enough to realize that if she is going to offer any kind words, she will have to state them unequivocally over and over again until everyone, including her, believes it.